It’s William Whytock’s slice of bucolic paradise, 16 hectares of hobby farm and horse stables where his two teenage daughters perfect their riding skills.

This past weekend, the retired airline pilot’s peaceful life was interrupted by a massive police presence just one acreage away, where an elderly couple has lived for more than four decades. Their son Douglas Garland is the person of interest questioned over the weekend in the abduction of Kathryn and Alvin Liknes and their five-year-old grandson, Nathan O’Brien.

“This is a quiet road, my girls ride their horses up and down,” says Whytock as he sits atop his compact John Deere tractor, watching the constant action less than 100 metres north of his pretty two-storey home.

“Not much happens here.”

That’s not something Whytock can say anymore, as Calgary police and RCMP continue to scour the tall grasses surrounding the acreage for evidence in the disappearance of the Calgary family sometime between the late evening of Sunday June 29 and 10 a.m. the following morning, when Nathan’s mom Jennifer O’Brien arrived to pick up her son from a sleepover at his grandparents.

Throughout Saturday and Sunday, human walls of dark-clothed police officers can be seen from the road, moving slowly, shoulder-to-shoulder, through the tall grass, their heads lowered to the ground as they examine every inch beneath their feet. They do this through several hours of sweltering sun each day, long days that are punctuated by the occasional flurry of SUV convoys, K-9 units and at one point, a police boat taken out to a large slough 500 metres up the road.

Most of us are familiar with such scenes from watching the plethora of TV crime shows. To see it in real life, though, is another experience altogether. Knowing what is at stake here is so very real to so many people, it is chilling beyond belief.

No amount of witnessing gets one accustomed to the constant coming and going of RCMP vehicles, the incessant whirring of TV news helicopters — and later, a HAWCS helicopter — overhead. Even those who hold those policing jobs can hardly believe it all. “I don’t remember anything this big,” says one RCMP officer, his job to secure the perimeter, to me after offering a bottle of cold water. “We don’t even know what’s happening, which is probably good.”

The ongoing mystery of where the couple and their grandson could be, whether or not they are still alive, is compounded by the weekend’s developments. In its early stages, police wouldn’t even confirm a connection to the search here and the missing family. It is, though, sadly obvious from the start.

Mid-afternoon Saturday, scores of search and rescue personnel were combing the Parkhill neighbourhood The Liknes’ have called home for nearly two decades. The search was abruptly called off; minutes later, a large convoy of Calgary police vehicles could be seen racing up Highway 2 in the direction of the city of Airdrie.

Not surprisingly, by the suppertime news hour Saturday, my broadcast colleagues began to inform their viewers that this could be related to the disappearance of the trio.

The lack of information also echoes the mystery surrounding their disappearance sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning, an event that started as an act of violence, a fact confirmed by police several days later.

As I wait on the side of the road through the weekend with a growing army of journalists, I send out on social media only that information I can be sure of, that I see with my own eyes. Occasionally, a neighbour in this beautiful rural district stops and admits that they are just as dumbfounded as those residents of Parkhill.

“This is such a beautiful, pleasant place to live,” says longtime resident Corissa Boychuk, a former two-time world champion gymnast and sister of NHL hockey player Zack. “It’s so hard to believe something horrible might have happened right here, in our quiet area.”

Another car, this one with a friendly middle-aged couple who won’t give their names, tell me that “those are real nice people that live there.”

In time, we learn of the many and myriad connections between the disappearance and the residents of the acreage, a full day after a press conference at police headquarters in which the duty inspector can’t even confirm if the man being questioned is known to police, if he lives at the acreage, or if the truck photographed outside the Liknes home on June 29 was found on the property.

For people like William Whytock, it’s all a little too much to take in. “I’m just in an observer seat,” he says of one family’s nightmare, that has caught the attention of people across Canada and around the world. “And honestly, I can’t quite believe it’s happening.”

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